Abstract

Twitter’s popularity has changed the way in which companies and individuals interact with each other, products and services. This micro blogging service has allowed for customers to provide their positive, negative and/or noncommittal sentiment and opinion about any topic from entertainment to significant weather events. In this research, we build a framework that merges the twitter, natural disaster and aviation communities. We consider 4 U.S.-based severe weather events that included tornadoes, hurricane and massive snowstorm (called a nor’easter), 6 large and medium sized airlines and 3 weather stations. Through our evaluation, we show how a suite of keywords correlated to the weather event geographically and the timeliness of the notification from the weather service and airlines. We show how we can effectively leverage the micro blogging platform for airlines in a significant weather event situation.